An emerging networking paradigm that separates a network control plane from a data forwarding plane is a software-defined network (SDN). As a promising paradigm for dramatically improving network resource utilization, simplifying network management, reducing operating costs, and promoting innovation and evolution, SDN has shown great potential for data center networks and the next-generation Internet.
Recently, SDN has been extended to support 5G communication networks. The main functions of SDN are (i) to separate the data plane from the control plane and (ii) to introduce novel network control functionalities based on an abstract representation of the network. In current instantiations of SDN, these functions are realized by (i) removing control decisions (e.g., routing) from the hardware (e.g., switches or routers), (ii) enabling programmable flow tables in the hardware through an open, standardized interface (e.g., Openflow—a protocol that allows a server to tell network switches where to send packets), and (iii) using a logically centralized network controller that defines the behavior and operation of the network forwarding infrastructure.
Existing work to address these problems focuses on balancing data traffic in data plane, which aims to evenly distribute data traffic flows among network links. Further work focuses on the “pure” facility allocation problem that considers the optimal network planning for the minimum required facilities, and does not take the impact on the traffic performance from the given allocation into account.